A common pattern I have come to recognize everywhere as an anti-pattern: Person starts a dialogue establishing a problem, upon which we all agree Person continues on down the same line of conversation, outlining a solution Person comes to a conclusion which is a call to action I see this a lot because step 1 seems...

You like little treats, so do other people! Sometimes you gotta give your peers something to make them feel good too. Sometimes this is called the hairy arm technique, sometimes it’s a manifestation of Cunningham’s Law. What you do is this: present something obviously wrong or easily correctable when you make a...

Palate cleanser tasks are morale boosts I’ve found that my productivity varies wildly based on the time of year, the phase of the moon, my mental state, the quality of my morning shower thought session, and how enthusiastic I am about what I’m working on. I like to give myself “little treat” issues occasionally to...

We’re a couple of years into the LLM hype cycle and the volume at this point is deafening. I use LLMs, and I find them interesting, and they have played a major part of my professional life for the past two and a half years. That said, I can’t declare them an unqualified success or a miracle cure for anything. I...

Over the course of your job, you are going to need to operate outside of the range of your defined permissions and responsibilities. You should do this sparingly and secretly. You should be able to operate outside of the system when you need to, and you need to know how to do it in non-obvious ways so you don’t get...

Nobody should have to ask what you’re working on. You should leave an obvious, loud trail. Encourage this pattern in others. One thing that is important to me as an engineer that I don’t think I’ve seen put in writing is something I have distilled into the term passively transparent. It should be obvious to the...

Be overprepared. As the phrase goes, don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash. Send along curated information that is a good summary of what you are doing, but be able to support it with research, opinion, or buy-in when pushed. Reveal enough to convey that you are a force, but do not reveal everything....

Development Languages/Technologies I am primarily a Python expert (25 years!) I am primarily a FastAPI user, and I am better than average at doing async programming (which sucks and is bad, but it’s fun to do bad things) I primarily choose Postgres as my database I do most of my personal dev projects in Go Over the...

Problem Space At my new job, my new team engages in a team activity: every other week we get together for 30 minutes to play a game together online. We’re mixed hybrid, meaning about half of us work in office and half of us are grandfathered/exceptioned in to working remotely. this means we can’t play a board/card...

I’m an enthusiast of playing around with different window management schemes. I like the idea of a tiling window manager, but I’m not smart enough to ever get really productive in something like i3 or sway. for the past few years I’ve been using Rectangle on MacOS as something of a band-aid I’ve been using the...

Post Contents Introduction Goals Anti-Goals First Things First Retrieval-Augmented Generation What The Hell is a RAG? What does this mean? Case Study: The Dumbest Possible Person in the Room Getting the Data A Eulogy for wget Enter Playwright Our Playwright Script Cleaning Up the Data Install Unstructured Processing...

I got my first job as a software engineer in 2000, so in 2024 I’m pushing a quarter century of being a developer. This is one of the topics I have begun to hold near and dear to my heart. Software engineering is a team sport. If you’re not setting new players up for success, you’re not being the best teammate you...